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Thursday, 9 May 2013

Citadel of the Severed Hand - One Page Dungeon

The One Page Dungeon competition has been going for a few years now. Each time it rolls around my head is in a different place inspiration wise.

In 2011 I had finished a marathon reading of the Lord of the Rings and had hobbits on the brain. That and I had spent a lot of time in Paris cooped up in an apartment in the dead of winter trying to keep warm. Unable to understand the most basic French I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about RPGs. I would sketch out game ideas late into the night. The end result was Vermin Hollow.

In 2012 I had just finished teaching, a job that slowly drove me crazy. At the time I had been reading Raggi’s dark fantasy Lamentations of the Flame Princess and a grimy port city wracked by war was bubbling away in the back of my mind. From this sprung Rot Tower. I had originally intended to post my work on the Rot Tower campaign setting to this blog but I never wrangled my writing into something I thought I could share.

A recent RPGsite thread: players as colonists, seized my imagination and I set about creating a settlement style campaign with a dwarven focus. A band of dwarven misfits reclaiming the holds long ago overrun by orcs. The first adventure involved taking a citadel that watched over a bay, with the dwarf resettlement expedition arriving by boat. Seizing the citadel would provide a foothold in their ancestral lands and a place for the initial band to settle in relative safety. From there they could look at reclaiming other sites and clearing lower levels as things moved towards a hex crawl exploration dungeon crawl style game. From these ideas my 2013 One Page Dungeon Citadel of the Severed Hand was born. Here's a blog post about the Citadel play test.

Citadel of the Severed Hand was to have included a random orc table, inspired by the John Blanche artwork of the early Citadel Compendiums. The injuries were intended to have been inflicted by the sadist demoness who lords it over the orcs. I picture her as a female Joffrey from Game of Thrones. Unfortunately the table was cut as I ran out of space. I thought I would add the table to the blog instead.

Severed Hand Orc Table

Orc name

Appearance/injury

What are they doing?

Treasure

Tizog

Severed hands nailed to shield.

brawling

Shrooms (see shroom table)

Lutnob

Keeps small rat in empty eyesocket.

dozing - half awake

Decorative dwarf beard rings.

Brugzod

Lost hand replaced with crude hook, wears necklace of small humanoid skulls.